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The history of psychoanalytic thinking about motivation is a history of the core controversies which have occupied the field. Freud's discovery of unconscious sexual motives and his appreciation of their power generated much of the excitement of the early days of psychoanalysis. Freud's struggles to understand masochistic motives contributed to the development of the dual instinct theory. Freud elaborated the structural theory in part because he came to recognize unconscious motives of defence. Ego psychologists organized and systematized the energic and structural concepts implied but not fully spelled out in Freud's various instinctual drive theories of motivation. The last 30 years have seen many efforts at replacing the economic concepts of classical metapsychology with other models. These various models, such as information processing models, have implied different theories of motivation.
Joseph Lichtenberg steps into the fray with the volume under review. Lichtenberg's goal is to present a theory of motivation consistent with the burgeoning data from infant observation studies and also clinically relevant. This effort follows naturally from his 1983 book Psychoanalysis and Infant Research in which he reviewed the infant observation studies available at that time. His current book takes into account the findings of these and later studies and focuses specifically on the question of motivation.
The core of Lichtenberg's thesis is his concept of five motivational systems. The purpose of each system is to fulfil or regulate a basic need. The five basic needs are:
(1) The need for psychic regulation of physiological requirements, (2) the need for attachment-affiliation, (3) the need for exploration and assertion, (4) the need to react aversively through antagonism or withdrawal, and (5) the need for sensual enjoyment and sexual excitement (p. 1).
Lichtenberg devotes much of his book to documenting how each of these motivational systems is consistent with beh